How would you define the “European way of life”? What unique, homogenous culture is shared by people who live in Bolton, Palermo or Plovdiv – but not those who live outside Europe? And what threatens it so profoundly that the European Union has this week nominated a minister with responsibility for defending it?

Just asking these questions shows what a fatuous and deeply sinister stunt it was for the incoming president of the European commission, Ursula von der Leyen, to unveil a new role on Tuesday: vice-president for protecting the European way of life. Within a day – after widespread criticism – there were suggestions that the job title would be revised, but the intended message was clear. What supposedly threatens the “European way of life”, according to the commission, is migration – the new role incorporates the duties of the previous migration commissioner, bundling together the responsibility for controlling Europe’s external borders with security, employment and education.

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Who is Ursula von der Leyen?

Ursula von der Leyen has been president of the European Commission since 1 December 2019. Born in 1958, is the daughter of Heidi and Ernst Albrecht, the latter having been a senior politician in the centre-right Christian Democratic Union who rose to be governor of the state of Lower Saxony.

She spent the first 12 years of her life in Brussels, where her father was serving as a commission official. She studied economics at the universities of Göttingen and Münster before attending the London School of Economics where she used the pseudonym Rose Ladson because she was seen as a potential target for West German leftwing extremists.

Von der Leyen then read for a medical degree, becoming a gynaecologist, and only entered politics at 42. A mother of seven, she has held government positions as labour and family affairs minister, driving forward key policies on gender quotas for company boards and improved maternity and paternity pay and rights.

As commission president, Von der Leyen will represent the EU on the world stage, and her key tasks include building a working relationship with Donald Trump’s White House, and dealing with the next stage of post-Brexit trade negotiations with the UK.

Daniel Boffeyin Brussels and Philip Oltermann in Berlin

Photograph: Jean-François Badias/AP

There will be resistance to this new framing: as the Dutch liberal MEP Sophie in ‘t Veld told the Independent this week, “The very point about the European way of life, is the freedom for individuals to choose their own way of life… The implication that Europeans need to be protected from external cultures is grotesque and this narrative should be rejected.” Others pointed out that the commission’s choice of words echoed the far right, borrowing from those who suggest that immigration places European, Christian civilisation in mortal danger. But this is about more than language: European commissioners are the EU’s executive branch, and its most powerful officials; they draft laws and see that treaties are enforced. Each time a new parliament is elected, as one was in June, it chooses a new commission president.

Nationalism is an inherently exclusionary ideology, argues Valluvan, in which political community is always defined in opposition to “alien” outsiders

Yet Europe’s rightwing populists did not make Von der Leyen president of the commission, and her clumsy debut is another example of a broader trend: politicians of the centre adopting the nationalist demands of their far-right challengers in an attempt to keep them at bay. A German politician from Angela Merkel’s CDU, von der Leyen was nominated for president of the commission after European parliamentary elections that saw further success for rightwing populist parties in France, Italy, Hungary and elsewhere – though not the unstoppable wave that some observers predicted.

The centre right and centre left remain the largest parliamentary groupings, and Von der Leyen’s proposed commission – one commissioner from each of the EU’s member states, excluding the UK – is drawn largely from these sources. But its composition represents a strategy pushed by influential centrists such as France’s president, Emmanuel Macron – tougher rhetoric on immigration, as well as some concessions to rightwing populist governments in central and eastern Europe, mixed with a more assertive approach to issues such as overseas trade and taxing tech giants.

The plan, it appears, is to co-opt the demands of the far right – and thus neutralise their appeal – rather than take them on. In Von der Leyen’s words, “the European way of life is built around solidarity, peace of mind and security. We must address and allay legitimate fears and concerns about the impact of irregular migration on our economy and society.”

This is received political wisdom among the technocrats who have dominated politics in western Europe for years: take a tough stance on border control to address the “legitimate concerns” of “ordinary people” and the populists will lose their sting. Unfortunately, it is a bogus solution based on a fundamental misunderstanding.

It is nationalism, not populism or an “anti-establishment” feeling among voters, that poses the greatest threat in Europe – and it is a problem that cuts across the political spectrum. As the sociologist Sivamohan Valluvan argues in a thought-provoking new book, Europe is experiencing its third historic surge of nationalism. The first was in the mid-19th century, when nationalism was regarded by emerging democratic movements as a way to throw off the shackles of monarchy and absolutism. The second was in the 20th, when rival European states turned to the aggressive, protectionist forms of nationalism that wrought such destruction on the continent. The third is under way now. Nationalism is an inherently exclusionary ideology, argues Valluvan, in which political community is always defined in opposition to “alien” outsiders, however much we might wish it otherwise.

But it can take many forms. Alongside the conservative nationalism of the right, which emphasises tradition, religion or ethnicity, there are liberal nationalisms that can be just as powerful and as exclusionary. Think of the way that British governments, from the 1990s on, have made a forceful distinction between deserving and undeserving migrants: for instance, in policing access to the welfare state. Or of the way in which supposedly European values of tolerance and free speech are deployed in order to stigmatise outsiders who, for religious or cultural reasons, are assumed not to share them.

Since the Brexit referendum, the EU, especially among liberals, has often been held up as the antidote to nationalism. Yet for all its laudable aims – and its successes in reducing conflict between states – it plays host to its own, pernicious kind of civilisational chauvinism, one that draws a rigid line between “Europe” and neighbouring regions to the south and the east. The long history of ideas about European superiority, and the racist logic through which they were enforced, cannot be ignored here. We all know that “European” is often still used as a synonym for “white people”. Indeed, when Von der Leyen proclaimed that her new commissioners would be “as diverse as Europe is”, noting their gender balance and range of national backgrounds, she seemed not to notice that all of them were white.

Rhetoric around border control has real effects on the people who fall foul of it. The fact that Margaritis Schinas, a long-term commission insider, is the nominee for the new protector-in-chief post suggests that the EU’s migration policy will continue along the same lines as the past decade: hardening Fortress Europe and outsourcing migration controls to governments in Asia and Africa, while neglecting humanitarian rescue in the Mediterranean and the humiliating conditions in camps in south-eastern Europe and elsewhere. At the same time, the commission does not seem inclined to challenge those governments who, under the pretence of defending culture and values, have been busily undermining protections for citizens and non-citizens alike: the Hungarian nominee for commissioner is Viktor Orbán’s former justice minister, who oversaw the introduction of laws criminalising NGOs for helping refugees, set up container camps for asylum-seekers and drew up plans to limit the power of his country’s judiciary.

Von der Leyen was reportedly shocked by the backlash to the new job title, reportedly saying that her intention was to reclaim the rhetoric of security and threat from the far right. But drawing a line like this between Europe and the rest only reinforces the idea that there is something to fear from migration and cultural difference. If Europe’s leaders have only platitudes at their disposal to define the “European way of life”, there are other politicians waiting to fill such empty phrases with far more dangerous substance.

It is understandable that people in Britain might feel there are more pressing issues than appointments in Brussels. But the rightwards drift of the commission has an important connection to our own arguments about Brexit. The question of the UK’s future relationship with the EU has to be more than a choice between fighting to remain within an unchanged Fortress Europe, or leaving to create our own Fortress Britain instead.

How can we make common cause with people in other countries who are resisting the sort of reactionary nationalist politics we see here? This is the truly urgent task if we want to meaningfully protect our ways of living – in all their variety – rather than leaving it to politicians who may not be up to the job.

• Daniel Trilling is a journalist and author specialising in migration